Photograph by: Sean Kilpatrick
, THE CANADIAN PRESS

VANCOUVER — Darcy Marquardt found love in Beijing amid crushing Olympic disappointment, and with her engagement ring dangling from a necklace on Thursday and her fiance in the crowd at London, the Richmond-born rower finally got that elusive medal.

Young Olympic rookie Lauren Wilkinson of North Vancouver, rowing in the same women’s eights boat as the veteran Marquardt, earned the medal her father was denied the opportunity to go after when Canada joined the boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980.

And Krista Guloien, the fashionista from Port Moody with an eye for bright colours, especially on her toenails, can now flash some silver bling from her neck.

An Olympic Games is rich with emotional and colourful stories behind the athletes and the three B.C. members of the Canadian women’s eights crew, which captured a silver medal on Thursday, are no exception.

But before we get into love and redemption and well-deserved retirement, competitive rowing is also about surviving almost unimaginable pain and overcoming gut-busting exhaustion.

After finishing second to the powerful Americans at the 2010 and 2011 worlds and then coming within 0.03 seconds of upsetting their rivals at a World Cup in May, the Canadians believed they might finally sink the U.S., unbeaten since 2005, at the Eton-Dorney rowing venue. But it just wasn’t to be.

The U.S., whose boat featured six returnees from Beijing, took an early lead and won in six minutes, 10.59 seconds. The Canadians posted the fastest splits over the final 1,000 metres of the 2,000-metre race, but settled for second in 6:12.06, with the Netherlands taking bronze in 6:13.12.

“Obviously, we wish that our bow had been in front but we just gave it our everything,” Wilkinson told reporters in London. “I don’t think a single person in that boat had anything left in the tank. So we have no regrets even though it wasn’t necessarily the colour of medal we had hoped for.”

Joy Fera, a Vernon native who rowed for Canada in the 1976 Olympics and who co-founded the Delta Deas Rowing Club, watched the race early Thursday with particular interest. She knows Marquardt well and rowed on the same national team as Wilkinson’s dad, David, and mom, Susan, and she appreciated what it took to win that medal.

“Those rowers have worked so very, very hard,” she said in an interview.

“One of the things I’m really enjoying with the [CTV] coverage is them having Dr. Greg Wells, the physiologist, explain to viewers what goes into this ... the pain of 240 strokes of maximum power ... of eight people in a boat maintaining a synchronicity while keeping your head in the boat, trying to listen to the sound of the coxswain over the roaring of the crowd.

“I remember once crossing the finish line of a race and all I saw was black and sparkles. One of the men’s eights said the same thing this week, that he could barely see. You’re just in such oxygen deprivation.

“The body is telling the brain ‘this is hurting’ and the brain is saying ‘well, then quit,’ but you have to push through that. People who haven’t been in a boat rowing like that just don’t understand the endurance needed when there is such pain in your arms, legs and back and the cardiovascular.”

For Marquardt, 33, and Guloien, 32, the silver medal was just reward after seeing potential medals at other Games slip through their calloused fingers.

Marquardt and Buffy Williams were fourth in the women’s pairs at Athens in 2004. And Marquardt was part of the eights crew that finished fourth at Beijing. Guloien rowed in the women’s coxless fours at Beijing and finished eighth.

“We laid it all on the line today and that’s an Olympic silver,” Marquardt, who has said she will retire, told Postmedia News. “We can’t be upset with that.”

Marquardt, who took an 18-month break from her sport after 2008, met relay swimmer Richard Hortness of Medicine Hat, Alta., on a bus travelling to the diving competition at Beijing.

He returned to school at the University of Nevada Las Vegas after those Games, but the two kept in touch. When Marquardt, inspired by watching the 2010 Winter Olympics at home, decided to take one last shot at a medal, the two moved to London, Ont., where the women’s eights team trains.

They became engaged last November and will marry next year at her grandparents’ cottage in the Okanagan.

“We had to go all the way to Beijing to find each other,” she told the Toronto Star two months ago. “There comes a point when you realize that you don’t see your life without that someone in it. Rich is my rock.”

At 22, Wilkinson was the youngest member of the boat at London. Her father, who would have raced the eights or pairs at Moscow if not for the boycott, was there to watch her victory.

Lauren might well be the face of the eights crew in 2016, but she was the “hands” of the team this year. Last week, Maclean’s magazine used two full pages to run a startling photo of her heavily calloused and blistered hands to demonstrate just how committed the women are.

Fera can relate.

“I remember putting out my hands to get change at a grocery store and being embarrassed at how calloused my hands were.”

Guloien, a Simon Fraser University criminology grad who moved to London, Ont., in 2006, comes from a very athletic family. Her father Nels is a masters level mountain bike rider and her sister, Leah, is a road cyclist who has competed in Europe the last three years with the Canadian national team.

Thursday’s silver medal, said Krista, marked the pinnacle of her life.

“As of right now, this is it,” she told the Tri-City News from London. “There’s nothing better. I’m still going to work to try to achieve better in life in some way, but right now, I’m not really sure how.”

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